


fell in love in midair

by zedpm



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Blanket Permission, First Time, Fluff and Angst, Lowercase, M/M, Mostly Fluff, Mutual Pining, POV Third Person, Past Tense, past perfect if yr nasty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-12
Updated: 2019-06-12
Packaged: 2020-05-01 21:01:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19185457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zedpm/pseuds/zedpm
Summary: “we never did go to alpha centauri,” aziraphale said.





	fell in love in midair

**Author's Note:**

> good omens queerbaited the _shit_ out of me, y’all. i have no idea what this is, but i hope y’all enjoy it anyway!

> & I knew: we would be so terribly  
>  happy. Our work would be simple. Our kissing would rhyme  
>  with cardiac arrest. Birds would overthrow the cathedral towers.  
>  I would have a magician’s hair, full of sleeves & saws,  
>  unashamed to tell the whole town our first date was  
>  in a leaky faucet factory. How we fell in love during jumps  
>  on his tragic uncle’s trampoline. We fell in love in midair.
> 
> —Chen Chen, “Summer Was Forever”

 

 

“we never did go to alpha centauri,” aziraphale said.

crowley raised an eyebrow mildly. “and whose fault is that?”

aziraphale smiled and hooked their arms together. “yours, dear.”

 

 

it wasn’t like they hadn’t known they were in love, before the whole apocalypse thing. well, mostly they hadn’t; they’d known that they were, at any given time, a few inches from being in love. the trick with the love was to treat it like quantum particles—if they never observed it, then they could continue to exist in a universe where it was both true and not true that they both loved and did not love one another. if it stayed in that quantum state, an unspoken, unobserved thing, then the future would never take definite shape. they could continue to negate one another by doing nothing, and by not loving each other, they would never tip the scales ever-so-slightly towards goodness, as more love was wont to do.

 

 

and then the world hadn’t ended, except for the bits of it that had.

 

 

they had come close, a few times. aziraphale had noticed, of course, the first time he’d seen crowley after the whole black knight debacle. there had been a great aura of love surrounding him, clogging up the air, rather like a cloud of vaporous and pungent perfume. he had just stared, unable to think of a single word in response.

and crowley had scowled, and said, “look, i don’t like it either, alright?”

“you’d best keep that under control, crawly,” aziraphale had said blankly, “if you’ve any expectation of us working together.”

“it’s crowley,” crowley had said, his scowl deepening. “and i’ve got it. don’t worry your pretty little head about it, angel.”

and aziraphale had thought, _ah, shite. me too, then._

 

 

“we can run away together,” crowley had said, and chosen for the both of them.

 

 

after the world hadn’t ended, and after they both hadn’t died, and after they’d both gotten a bit tipsy and a bit handsy, they’d gone back to the bookshop without discussion. it had been a nice day, and they’d walked their way there, neither acknowledging the way they leaned into each other nor their relief at seeing humans on the streets beside them, shouting and mooning and utterly, wonderfully oblivious of how close they’d come to annihilation.

they drank more, at the reconstituted shop, watching the day fall into dusk, looking at each other. occasionally, one of them would sneak a glance, then realize he didn’t have to be subtle, and a glance would become a gaze. it was still new to both of them.

“it’s odd, isn’t it?” aziraphale murmured.

“that it is,” crowley agreed. “i still don’t even want to say it, even though i can, now. feel like they’ll pop out of the shadows the second i do.”

“i know what you mean,” aziraphale said, and sipped his drink. they sat in silence for another half hour before he said, slowly, “i love you.” a beat, and then, “but you knew that.”

“that i did.” crowley knocked their feet together. “i love you. you knew that, too.”

“i did indeed.” aziraphale smiled a little. “but it’s rather nice to be able to say it.”

 

 

after the shock of it all wore off, aziraphale spent a whole day on it. “i love you,” he told crowley, over and over. “i love you, i love you, i love you, i love you.”

when he’d gotten it out of his system, crowley told aziraphale that he couldn’t talk for a week. “sick of your voice,” he said.

“i love you,” aziraphale said again, and crowley kissed him.

 

 

it had been sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, the second time. by then crowley had figured out that aziraphale wanted him just as fiercely and as foolishly as he did aziraphale, though he’d known even less what to do with the knowledge.

he spent an afternoon sampling various toxic human drugs, and come nightfall, the euphoria had given way to a kind of melancholic hopelessness. quite interesting, really. and his impulse control had been shot straight to heaven, too, which was doubtless why he found himself at aziraphale’s door.

“angel!” he slurred. “let me in, angel.”

aziraphale opened the door and tutted at him, the insufferable sod, and brought him back to the couch, watching him with eyes equally judgemental and affectionate. “you could sober up, you know.”

crowley grunted.

aziraphale sighed. “quite.”

crowley turned over to look at him more closely. “they don’t check up on us about anything,” he said. “it’s not like they would notice.”

aziraphale’s lips tightened, because of course he knew exactly what crowley meant. that was the thing about never talking about something; the conversation was always getting loose in other ways. it was always there, in the periphery, in the movement of muscles or the inflection of particular syllables. there was no such thing as a non sequitur in a conversation that was always and never happening. “you know it’s not about them noticing. why we can’t.”

crowley didn’t move for a moment, and then he said, “of course i know that.” he roared at nothing and punched the couch. _“fuck!”_

“crowley,” aziraphale said.

“don’t you ever—” crowley broke off, screamed again. “do you even—”

aziraphale grabbed crowley’s hand. “no,” he said quietly. “i don’t. because if i did, i would.”

 

 

some things changed. most things didn’t. they still went for long, aimless walks in the park, got drunk together, got dinners that went on for hours. but when they were done, they went back to crowley’s flat hand in hand.

 

 

the last time had been just months before the aborted apocalypse. they’d been drinking in aziraphale’s bookshop, and aziraphale had looked at crowley, really _looked_ at him, and he’d been filled with such overwhelming anger that when the wave of it had passed he’d been somewhat amazed to find he hadn’t fallen in the process.

“what,” crowley had said.

“sometimes i wish,” aziraphale said. “sometimes, i _covet.”_

 _you,_ he hadn’t said, but they’d both heard it.

“don’t we all,” crowley had said, but his eyes said, _don’t i just._

 

 

alpha centauri had three suns. they were lovely from above.

“is it what you imagined?” aziraphale asked.

crowley smiled back at him. “you know,” he said, “i think it might be even better.”


End file.
